“This year we’re seeing a continuation of that trend, whereby it’s getting easier and easier to use your phone to make secure transactions. The check-out process is made much simpler if all you need is your fingerprint to authenticate and authorise payment in just one or two touches”

M-payment users is forecast to grow by 150 percent this year in Canada (Source: fieldservice.com)

The research found that 29 percent of Canadians browsed shopping websites on a weekly basis in the middle of 2015, but only 6 percent made a purchase. Touch commerce reduces the time taken between browsing to transaction on a mobile phone or tablet from minutes to seconds, simplifying the check-out process. Deloitte expects this advantage to reduce ‘cart abandonment’, when consumers start buying something on mobile, but give up before purchasing.

Deloitte also predicts that mobile will become the leading games platform by software revenue in 2016, reaching 37 percent of total gaming sales and surpassing both console and PC games. Canada’s gaming industry is the third largest in the world, contributing USD 2.3 billion to GDP and employing over 20,000 full time equivalents. Mobile is less lucrative than traditional PC or console games, with average revenue at only USD 40,000 per mobile game compared to USD 2.9 million for a PC game and USD 4.8 million for a console game.

Nevertheless, mobile is predicted to become the leading games platform by software revenue in 2016, generating 37 percent of sales, up 20 percent from 2015. This compares to 34 percent for PC games and 29 percent for console games, up just five and six percent respectively from 2015.

For this year, Deloitte predicts USD 4.8 million of revenue per console game (USD 145 per console player), USD 2.9 million per PC game (USD 50 per PC games player), but just USD 40,000 per mobile game (USD 20 per mobile games player).

Deloitte also expects the niche product virtual reality (VR) headsets to move from the lab to the store for consumer purchase in 2016 with hardware and software sales totaling USD 1 billion globally and less than USD 30 million in Canada.

The US traditional TV market, a bellwether for the Canada's and the world’s largest at about USD 170 billion in 2016, is predicted to see erosion on six fronts: the number of pay TV subscribers; pay TV penetration as a percent of total population; average pay TV monthly bill; consumers switching to antennas for watching TV; and live and time shifted viewing by the overall population, especially millennials 18-24 years old. Despite concern of traditional TV collapsing, Deloitte predicts the decline will be gradual.

Almost all of these US trends are seen in Canada, although Canadians watch about 240 minutes of live and time shifted TV daily, compared to 320 minutes in the US. The number of gigabit internet connections available to Canadians is expected to surge to over four million by the end of 2016, with at least 100,000 subscriber homes by year end, in line with global adoption.

Rising demand will be fuelled by increasing availability and falling prices. Those hundred thousand subscribers still only represent less than 3 percent of Canadian customers on Gigabit-capable networks by the end of the year.

Telecompaper.com